She giggled as Ryan led her to the wrong bedroom, correcting him by taking him to hers. They shut the door and fell on the bed, making out furiously as he undid the ties of her bikini top and she sighed with anticipation.
But just as it was getting good, the bedroom door burst open. Lizzy shrieked and grabbed the sheet to cover herself, and Ryan rolled off her and looked blearily at Jackie, who stood in the doorway white as a sheet and panting like she’d just run a marathon.
“What is it?” Lizzy said, a frisson of alarm racing down her spine.
“The police are at the door. Everyone’s freaking out. Neighbors complained. They want to see you. The police!”
“Oh, shit,” said Lizzy, knowing there was weed and alcohol and underage teenagers everywhere. “Oh, shit,” she said again as she stumbled off the bed and went to the front door.
• • •
It turned out it wasn’t such a big deal. The police just sent everyone home. When they realized Lizzy was Ronni Sunshine’s daughter, they said they wouldn’t take it any further. They pretended they couldn’t smell the weed, hadn’t tripped over empty beer bottles on the front lawn. If everyone left, they said they would forget about it. If they could come back and get an autograph for his grandma, said one, they would let this one slide. And they smiled as drunken teenagers slipped out past them in the foyer.
After one last lingering kiss, Ryan left. Everyone left except for Jackie and Lizzy, who stumbled up to bed as soon as the house was empty, both falling into a deep, drunken sleep.
seven
Lizzy is swimming back to consciousness, vaguely aware of someone shaking her. Her head is pounding, a wave of nausea washing over her even before she opens her eyes. Slowly she realizes the sound she is hearing is her sister’s voice.
“What the heck? What the heck, Lizzy? Wake up! Get up! Mom’s going to kill you. Get out of bed now!”
Lizzy opens her eyes to see Meredith standing over her with a stricken face. Nothing makes sense. Why is Meredith here? She’s supposed to be in England, living with their grandparents while she does her year at the University College London. Unless this is still a dream . . . Lizzy closes her eyes again, sinking back into the pillow. This must be a dream.
“Get the hell out of bed, Lizzy!” Meredith shouts in her ear.
Lizzy groans and opens her eyes properly this time. “Okay, okay, I get it. This isn’t a dream.” She sits up. “Meri? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Never mind that. What the hell happened? The house is ruined.”
“What do you mean, ruined? I just had a few people over last night.”
“A few?” Meredith is almost hysterical. “The house is totally trashed. What the hell, Lizzy?”
Lizzy perches on the edge of her bed, holding her head and groaning. “Do you have any painkillers?”
“No, I don’t have any painkillers,” snaps Meredith, who disappears for a couple of minutes, returning with a glass of water and two pills. “Take these.”
“I think I need three.” Lizzy groans as she stumbles out of bed, takes the pills, and starts making her way downstairs.
“Start with those. You need to get up and help me clean this house. I already woke your friend and she’s dealing with the kitchen. How many people did you have here? I presume Mom has no idea. Where is she anyway?”
But Lizzy doesn’t answer. By now she has seen the living room. Even Lizzy is shocked at the state of the house. There is broken glass all over, tipped-over bottles of wine on the sofa, and red wine on the carpet. There are cigarette burns on the rug and floor, kitchen cupboard doors are hanging off the hinges, and all over the counters, on every visible surface, all over the garden, even in the pool, are empty cans and bottles and cigarette butts.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Meredith mutters over and over. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Why don’t you just say, ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me,’” says Lizzy. “Why don’t you actually swear, because I know you want to. I know that you’re judging me. Just get it all out.”
Meredith ignores her. She goes into the kitchen and gets a bucket, fills it with soapy water, grabs a big scrubbing brush, and gets on her hands and knees to work on the wine stains in the carpet. Jackie is wiping every surface in the kitchen with Clorox, her face ablaze with shame at being caught by Lizzy’s older sister.
Lizzy starts doing a half-assed job of pretending to clean up. She moves slowly around the house and yard, her head still pounding, gingerly holding a trash bag into which she is throwing all the empties. She’s telling herself it really doesn’t look so bad, the cleanup really isn’t so much. She fills the bag, ties it, and puts it outside to take to recycling, before coming back inside to stand in front of Meredith.
“So what are you doing here? Actually?”
Meredith pauses, sits back on her haunches. “I was homesick,” she says. “I wanted to come back and see everyone.”
“You were homesick for Mom?” Lizzy is astonished.
“Not Mom, exactly.”
“Right, because you escaped! You managed to get free of her, and not just free, but all the way over to England. Lucky you.”
“You’re a sophomore. Two more years and then you can leave too. Anyway, she’s not that bad with you. You’re the only one who has ever been able to handle her.”
“You mean I stand up to her?”
“Whatever it is you do, it makes her less horrific. Where is she, anyway?”
Lizzy shrugs. “Busy as ever. She’s touring for A Chorus Line. Didn’t she tell you?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in a while. When will she be back?”
“Probably when the director of the show realizes what a nightmare she is.” Lizzy grins at Meredith, and for the first time since she walked in the house, Meredith grins back.
“Poor, poor director,” she says. “You know he won’t be the one to dump her.”
“I know. She’ll dump him once she realizes how desperately dull and boring he is.” Lizzy parrots her mother as Meredith shakes her head.
“It’s awful how well you do her.”
“That’s because I’m stuck with her all the time. Actually, that’s not true, because she’s hardly ever here, but when she is, I’m the one with her.” Her face grows serious. “I wish you weren’t living in London, Meri. I wish you were still here.”
“But I wouldn’t be living at home even if I were here,” Meredith reminds her. “I’d be living in New York at Columbia, remember? I probably wouldn’t ever see you.”
“I would be taking a train in to see you, though,” says Lizzy. “It would be fun.”
Meredith peers at her sister. “Does it actually bother you, being on your own here? You never needed help from Nell or me. You always had both Mom and Dad wrapped around your little finger. All Nell and I did was get in your way.”
“True,” says Lizzy, and they both laugh. “But I do miss you. I’m totally fine with Mom being away as much as she is, but it was more fun when I was little and I had my sisters with me. That’s all.”
“I’ll be home in six months,” Meredith reminds her.
“Home, home?”
“Well, not here. Obviously. I wouldn’t move back in with Mom for a billion dollars.”
“Christ, I can’t wait to leave home.”
The doorbell chimes, making them both jump. They stare at each other, eyes wide. Lizzy is in an old T-shirt, her hair ratty and tangled, mascara smudged around her eyes, her skin tinged gray. And the house is far from cleaned.
“Whoever it is, let’s just ignore it. They’ll go away,” she says.
“We can’t,” Meredith says, standing up. “It might be important.”
“If it’s important, they’ll come back,” Lizzy argues, as the doorbell rings again. But when she sees her sister heading fo
r the door, she mutters, “I’ll go. Please, God, let it not be Ryan.” When she gets to the front door, she peers out through the sidelights.
“Urgh,” she says. “It’s the next-door neighbor. At least it’s not Mom.”
eight
Meredith doesn’t mind that Lizzy has left to meet Ryan and she is left to clean up the house. It’s what she does, after all: takes care of things and cleans up other people’s messes. Other things she does? Not complain when she is living in London and comes home to be with her family, only to find her mother is not there. She’s learned not to complain about her mother. She learned from Nell not to flinch at her mother’s raging but to slip quietly out of the room as quickly as she could. Then she figured out on her own that, sometimes, bringing her mother a big glass of wine would calm her down. In the end, that was the difference between the three sisters. Nell would disappear. Meredith would try to please. And Lizzy would ignore it.
When the house is finally back in order, including the cabinet in the kitchen fixed, Meredith sits on the side porch with a beer, one of the few left after Lizzy’s party. She puts her feet up on the ottoman, smiling as she sips and looks out at the treetops, enjoying this reunion with the peaceful view.
You can’t see the water from the house, but you know it’s there; you can smell it. The light is different too. Whatever bad memories this house contains, it is still, it will always be, home.
In the corner of the yard, hidden by the darkening sky, is the trampoline. Lizzy was the one who loved the trampoline the most, but Meredith would lie on it for hours with her friend Rachel, the two of them talking about everything under the sun. Every now and then Meredith’s mother would rap on the window to get them to jump, to exercise, but as soon as she disappeared they would flop back down on their bellies again.
At the bottom of the hill is Longshore, where she learned to play tennis, badly. Where she went every day during summer in the hope that one of the pool lifeguards would notice her, that she might finally have a summer romance.
She never did. They never noticed the chubby girl with the mousy hair and sweet smile, but that’s okay. She found her solace, her romance, the life she should have been living, in the pages of books. And now, at nineteen, she finally has a boyfriend. A fellow student at University College London, he is studying PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) and she switched her major to study the same.
She had originally thought about Goldsmiths or Central Saint Martins, wanting to do a degree in fine art, but her father hadn’t understood. “How will you make money from art?” he had asked, bemused. And so she had applied to a number of universities in the UK, choosing English as a general degree.
She soon found she was doing less and less of the art she had always loved. There wasn’t the time. She was involved in the student union and had joined the bridge club. Which was where she met Gavin. They formed a team, and a friendship, which grew into a romance after he stammered that he wanted to take her to a film one night and perhaps for a bite to eat afterward.
They went to the Everyman in Hampstead to see Good Will Hunting, and then to Maxwell’s for a burger and terrible fat, soggy French fries that were nothing like the French fries she was used to in America.
She found Gavin very nice, if a little odd. He had a mop of black curly hair, and tortoiseshell glasses, plus a nervous tic of clearing his throat, which she found endearing and sweet. His trousers were always a little short, and his socks a glistening white. He wasn’t exactly the romantic hero she had pictured herself with, after all those years of losing herself in the pages of hundreds of novels, and she wasn’t exactly attracted to him, but he really, really liked her, and she liked him enough to give it a go.
What she really liked, though, was having a boyfriend. She would insert it into every conversation. At the corner shop she would say, “Oh, and can I have some Polos for my boyfriend?” At the sandwich shop she would say, “I’ll have an egg salad with lettuce, tomato, and cucumber, and my boyfriend will have Coronation Chicken on a bap, please.” When strangers struck up conversations with her, she would casually insert “my boyfriend” as soon as she could, just in case the encounter ended quickly and she’d lose the chance to mention to the universe that someone loved her, that she was finally, finally enough.
Being able to say she had a boyfriend, being able to insert the fact into conversation, transformed her in the eyes of the world. Or so she thought. No longer would they see her as a shy, overweight American girl who had never fit in. Now she was one of them! Whoever “them” might be.
And it was very nice being adored. Gavin did adore her. He didn’t show he adored her with flowers and chocolates, but he did buy her a fancy set of cards for bridge, and he always paid when they went out for dinner, and he kissed her when she went back to his flat one night to watch a video.
Meredith had been kissed by three boys before, but never as enthusiastically as Gavin. After that first kiss their relationship progressed and now they are sleeping together, but it isn’t quite what she expected either. She has yet to experience the elusive orgasm, and sex always seems to be over quickly, after a little bit of awkward thrusting in and out. But she does love the cuddling afterward, and Gavin is very good at cuddling.
The problem is it’s hard to find a place to cuddle. He can’t come back to her place because she’s living with her grandparents in Hampstead. As a result, she and Gavin are spending more and more time at his slightly grungy flat off Goodge Street. Now that they are officially an item, her grandparents seem to be fine with her spending the night. Judging from their stories about her mother, whatever Meredith did was tame by comparison.
Moving to London for university was the best thing she ever did. Moving away from her mother was the best thing she ever did. She misses her father and her sisters . . . well, Nell . . . but the strain of having to look after her mother and keep the peace was too much. However lovely it is to be home, she thinks, it is even lovelier to know that it’s temporary.
Not that things are easy with her father. He has remarried, to a woman named Selena, who was initially very nice to all the girls, taking them for pedicures and manicures when they came to stay, taking them out for “girls’ lunches,” insisting they be flower girls at the wedding.
And then Robert and Selena had a daughter, and the girls were swiftly sidelined, no longer welcomed, no longer part of this new family. They all tried, staying with their father’s new family for the holidays. But they couldn’t help noticing that Arianna, their half sister, received armfuls of gifts for Christmas, while they each got a small, single gift. Arianna’s bedroom was like a perfect fairy-princess palace, while they had to share the attic when they visited, sleeping in mismatched beds and stuffing their clothes in old drawers that didn’t quite close.
Nell and Lizzy eventually stopped going. Meredith tried to go by herself, but Selena was so unwelcoming, so passive-aggressive in her sideways comments about “weight issues,” that Meredith realized her sisters were right: they were now unwelcome visitors in their father’s home. It wasn’t a position she enjoyed or wanted to repeat. So now, she talks to her father on the phone from time to time, and wishes he would be the father he was before Selena came along.
Meredith sits up as a car growls into the driveway. An old Ford pickup truck from the 1950s, cherry red, with polished wood on the sides of the flatbed. There is only one person she knows who would drive a truck like that.
Meredith gets up, smiling, as Nell emerges from the driver’s side, walking over to the passenger side to let out a towheaded boy.
“Nell!” Meredith hustles over and hugs her sister, as the little boy stands by with a wide grin. Shyly he allows himself to be picked up and squeezed by his aunt.
“Do you know who I am?” Meredith asks, surprised at the wave of love and affection that is sweeping over her as she holds this little boy she has only met a handful of times.
“Aunt Meri,” he says, and she laughs in delight.
“I am! Oh, it’s good to see you! You got so big! How old are you? Twelve? Thirteen?”
He shakes his head solemnly, holding up four fingers of one hand.
“Four? Well, my goodness. I thought you were much older. You are so grown-up!” She puts him down and looks at Nell, marveling at how little Nell has changed, how comforting it is to see her. Nell has always been comforting. Her solidity, her quiet confidence, her sense of purpose in the world have always been Meredith’s port in the storm of her mother’s volatility. Tears spring into her eyes as she looks at her sister, wishing she saw her more.
“How’s the farm? How’s life? I can’t believe River!” The boy runs up the steps and lets himself into the house. “Look at him! He’s so grown-up.”
“And independent,” Nell says. “Life on a farm. He’s mucking out stables and feeding chickens. I have taught him well.”
The two women walk inside their mother’s home, now almost spotless thanks to Meredith’s day of cleaning. There are some things she couldn’t fix: the shattered glass of the coffee table, the red wine poured on the sofa, the broken chair leg. But there is a throw covering the wine stain, the glass has been removed, and the chair is now in the garage. There are only so many miracles Meredith was able to conjure up in the space of a day. She is in any case relieved that Nell doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
“Do you hear from Lewis?” It is a sensitive subject, Meredith knows, and not one that has ever been easy for Nell to speak about.
Nell and Lewis dated for a long time, all through senior year and then after he went to the University of Washington on a rowing scholarship and she went to the University of Vermont. In her sophomore year of college, she discovered she was pregnant. Six months pregnant. She had forgotten about her periods, had assumed the weight she was gaining was due to the amount of chocolate she had started eating. When the baby started kicking, she thought it was a muscle spasm.